L'adaptation de la voyelle /y/ en / ju/ dans les emprunts en russe : un cas de palatalisation, non de biphonemicite

The unnatural /Cju/ (< foreign /Cy/) sequence in Russian loanwords: A problem for the perceptual view

“…Although the phonetic symbols used by Golovinsky are not those of the international phonetic alphabet (to our knowledge, there is no Russian dictionary using this alphabet) and the transcriptions are based on the Cyrillic writing system, Golovinsky's dictionary, nonetheless, provides a good indication of the pronunciation of Russian words. As reported by Paradis and Thibeault (2004), despite being normative (see Lychyk, 1994:143), Russian graphemic representations are usually phonetically transparent. The results of their research before the back vowels /u/, /o/ and /a/ are presented in Table 1.…”

“…The front rounded vowel /y/ is, in the vast majority of cases, adapted as / j u/ after a palatalizable consonant (defined below) in the corpus of Russian borrowings appended to Paradis and Thibeault (2004). Examples of this adaptation are presented in (1).…”

“…(1) Adaptation of foreign /y/ as / j u/ in /Cy/ sequences in Russian Paradis and Thibeault's (2004) corpus, which will be more thoroughly described in section 4, includes 352 phonologically relevant cases of /y/ from 362 borrowing forms. A ''borrowing form'' is a borrowing pronounced by a native speaker consultant of the borrowing language (here, Russian).…”

“…The rare cases where a palatalized consonant appears intramorphemically before a back vowel in Russian are mainly borrowings, including those with the sequence /C j u/ (< /Cy/), which are the most numerous. Paradis and Thibeault (2004) performed an exhaustive search on word-initial /bV/, /dV/, /pV/ and /tV/ sequences in Golovinsky's (1912) dictionary. They chose this dictionary because the author provides phonetic transcriptions in his lexical entries.…”

“…As explained in Paradis and Thibeault (2004), it results from the delinking of the feature [Àback] from the vowel /y/. This delinking yields two changes: the first change is backing of the vowel /y/ to /u/; the second change is palatalization of the preceding consonant, if this consonant is palatalizable.…”